Our Core Values & Beliefs: The Bible 2 Peter 1:20-21, 2 Timothy 3:16-17 Pastor Daniel Reese

If you have your Bibles, I don't even know where to tell you to go.

We'll read 1 Peter chapter 1 first, I guess.

1 Peter 1 · chapter mention

We're starting a new series for the summer.

I know we're already into summer by several weeks, but we're going to spend the next,

I don't know, 12, 14, 15 weeks, just kind of giving you a breakdown of who we are, looking

at our beliefs, looking at our core values, what makes us who we are as a church.

That's the plan this summer.

So today we're just going to cover the foundation of where we get all of our beliefs from, and

that's the Bible.

And so hopefully we walk out of here confident in that this morning.

Now there is a chance that this will be my last Sunday here at Cornerstone for a little

while.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've received several letters and calls from the IRS.

They have informed me that I've not been paying my taxes, and if I don't rectify the situation

soon they will have to issue a warrant for my arrest.

Well, that phone call came on Thursday that I have a warrant out for my arrest because

I have failed to pay my back taxes.

Now fortunately they are giving me the option to pay them over the phone with my credit

card or a prepaid debit card.

If I do it that way then they are willing to cut the amount that I owe in half, and so

I will probably be doing that this week.

Now I'm just kidding about that, but I'm not kidding about the phone calls and the letters

that I have received this week.

Now I've seen enough of these kinds of things over the years to know that if I do a quick

Google search, I can figure out pretty quickly that this is a scam.

Plus I know that I always pay my taxes on time.

With these kinds of scams and hoaxes, there's all kinds of resources that you can use or

go to in order to figure out if something is true or not.

But what do we do and how do we determine if something is true or not when we don't

have the original sources anymore?

Especially when it comes to something like the Bible that's so crucial to our lives.

That's the question I want to be addressing this morning.

How do we know the Bible is true?

Why can we trust it?

Why do we build our lives around it?

Now there's a movement going around where people who grew up in the church, spent their

whole life in the church, are deconstructing their beliefs and twisting the Bible to fit

whatever makes them feel better about themselves.

Now when I have some quiet time and a long time, and I think we all know where that is,

and I have my phone with me and I'm scrolling through my phone, I come across reels.

Now I don't know what your 4U page looks like, but mine for instance is filled with people

telling dad jokes, people making furniture, people getting hurt because they're doing

stupid things.

It's also filled with what I'm assuming Instagram is considering Christian teaching.

Now one I saw the other day was a guy who was deconstructing Christianity and he asked

the question, how many times does the Bible say that a pastor spoke versus how many times

does the Bible say a donkey spoke?

Now his point was that the Bible says that a donkey spoke more times than anyone that

had the title of pastor.

Now it's a ridiculous premise to base your whole argument on that fact.

So when things like that begin to take traction, and there's a whole lot of stuff out there

that's confusing a whole mess of people, when stuff like that begins to take traction it

will cause confusion.

So I want us to walk out of here this morning confident in the Bible and what it says and

to put to rest some of the lies that we hear all around us all the time.

So here's rule number one when you are thinking about the Bible and learning about the Bible

and reading the Bible.

When you're discussing the Bible and learning about the Bible it is important to allow the

scriptures to interpret themselves because the Bible is never going to contradict itself.

Now Abby, she here?

Fantastic, Abby stuck around for a second service.

Abby's going to come up and read our passages this morning and we will see the harmony of

the scriptures that she reads.

We're going to start in 2 Peter chapter one.

I invite you to stand as we honor the Lord's word together.

Second Peter 1, 20 through 21.

Knowing this first of all that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation

for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man but man spoke from God as they were

carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Second Timothy 3, 16 through 17.

All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction,

and for training and righteousness that the man of God may be complete equipped for every

good work.

Amen, let's pray.

Father God we thank you for your word and I pray God that we will take a vested interest

in it today.

I pray that you will open our hearts to hear from you.

I pray that you will open our ears and eyes to understand it better and so grateful that

you allow us to have it and to read it and to hold it.

Father I pray that you bless our time.

Today we pray.

Amen.

Thank you, Abbey.

So that's the basis for, that text is the basis for our time this morning.

So what I would like to do, just tell you right out of the gate, I want to give you seven

reasons why we know the Bible is true.

Seven reasons why we know the Bible is true.

The first one being the internal claims that are found between the pages.

The Bible consistently and frequently claims to be the word of God.

There are phrases all throughout the Scripture like God said, the Lord said, God spoke, the

word of the Lord came.

And there's other similar phrases like that and those occur nearly 4,000 times in the

Bible.

I know of no other book that claims to be the word of God that many times.

In addition, both Peter and Paul claim that the Scriptures are in fact God's words that

have been written down by man.

Now even though the Bible is God breathed, there is both a human and divine element involved

in writing the Scriptures that we have in our hands.

The 66 books of the Bible were written by men and each one bears the particular writing

style of that author.

So a letter from Paul like we just went through is going to sound differently and have a different

structure than a Psalm written by David.

But it is God who inspired every single word that each one of those authors wrote.

Now that claim, that proof by itself in my opinion is not enough to base your entire

life on.

I could easily write a book that claimed 5,000 times that it was the word of God.

But that doesn't make it God's word, does it?

I could easily claim and many have that they are sent by God to bring a new word to this

generation that is contrary to the Bible.

The internal claims are important in believing the Bible is true, but they cannot be the

only thing.

But as we build these things on top of one another and put them all together, I hope

that you will see the value of these internal claims.

The next proof that shows why the Bible is true is the testimony of Jesus.

Jesus testified directly about God's word, that the Bible is truth.

He says in John 17, sanctify them in the truth.

Your word is truth.

Jesus also testified to the truth of the Bible by publicly reading the Scriptures, quoting

the Old Testament Scriptures, referring to actual historical events that are referred

to in the Scriptures.

Now if you don't have a starting point of the Bible, if that's not where you begin,

this one is not going to carry much weight by itself either.

By saying I value the testimony of Jesus, when you're not a believer and the Scripture

isn't your starting point, that's not going to carry a lot of weight.

Joseph Smith said the book of Mormon was from God and was true.

And Muhammad claims to be a prophet of God and that we should read the Quran.

So if you're trying to convince someone that the Bible is true, using the words of Jesus

aren't going to carry much weight, really any more weight than those other guys.

When you're not a believer, why would you care what the words of Jesus are?

But if you are a believer, you understand that the words of Jesus mean everything.

I mean this is God in the flesh declaring that the words in the Bible are truth.

That's a pretty good recommendation to me.

Now when I'm deciding whether or not I'm going to read a book or not, I will generally

turn over the back and I'll see who's recommending a particular book.

And if I recognize the authors or recognize the people that are recommending the book,

I have a higher, there's a more likely chance that I will actually read that book.

But if I turn it around and I don't recognize any of these people that are recommending

this book, I'm probably going to put it down.

When you're not a believer and you don't know who Jesus is, why would that matter to you?

But when Jesus says this book is truth, that carries a lot of weight for me.

So I'm going to take this book as truth and I'm willing to base my whole life around this

one truth.

But now let's get to some of the proofs that will help others who don't know Jesus buy

into why this book is truth.

This next one is one that I've seen many times help people come to terms with the reality

that the Scriptures are true.

It is the internal consistency that the Bible has.

So let's suppose for a minute that I chose 10 of you in this room at random.

And I gave you the task of writing a book on a topic like the meaning of life.

And you had a year to complete it.

The only rules are you're not allowed to talk to the other 10 people about what you're

writing about.

You can't consult one another.

And at the end of the year, what are the chances that when we get those 10 books back together

that they would even have the same theme?

They would even have the same content?

They would really concerning the specifics would have any sort of similarity.

There's probably not a high chance that that would happen.

And that would be true even though you're from the same community, you're from the same

church, you speak the same language.

Now imagine another book written over a period of 1500 years, written by 40 different authors

on three different continents in three different language.

What are the chances that you would find any consistency at all between the writings?

And yet that book, the Bible has a consistent theme from the beginning all the way to the

end.

And all these pieces are interwoven perfectly.

The Bible begins with a paradise that has this special tree in the middle of it.

It's described by Moses and Genesis.

And the book ends, the Bible ends with John writing about the special tree in the book

of Revelation and this different paradise.

And in between is written to show how God provides a way for sinful man who was banished

from the first paradise because of his sin and how they can live eternally in the second

paradise.

I'm going to show you this picture that I assume many of you have seen before.

If not, maybe this is new to you.

But this picture is one that shows the 63,779 cross references that are found in the Bible.

And so I doubt you can see it, but on the bottom you see a lot of white.

But if you were a little closer, I'd encourage you to Google this image.

If you were closer, you would see that on the left hand side is white and then next

to it's light gray and then dark gray and then light gray, dark gray.

And that separates each book of the Bible.

And the things that go down, the columns that go down are each book and how many verses

are in each chapter of each book.

You'll see the long one, that's Psalm 119, that's the longest chapter in the Bible.

And the lines that go in across are the 63,000 cross references where Genesis is referencing

Revelation or Revelation is referencing Genesis and all these things in between.

There's no other book on the face of the planet that has that much consistency whatsoever.

And everything in between there shows how all of this is connected.

There are thousands of examples that we could go through, but this is just a good visual

of the internal consistency that we have in the books that we are holding.

I think that's pretty cool.

If that isn't enough, let's look at some historical evidence.

Over the years, many people have claimed that the Bible is inaccurate because there's no

historical or archaeological evidence to support the biblical accounts.

But guess what?

Every single year, every single year, there continue to be new discoveries that actually

verify the biblical accounts.

There's thousands of examples that we could go over.

I don't think you want me to do all of that this morning, so I'll just give you a couple

of them.

Now, most of us, if we grew up in church, we know about the story of Jericho and how the

walls came tumbling down when the Israelites marched around the city seven times in one

day.

For many years, Bible skeptics laughed at that story claiming that walls just don't

come tumbling down.

They also claimed that the city was too big, that there's no way an army could march around

that thing seven times in one day.

But archaeological discoveries in the early 20th century by British professor John Garstang

and others give evidence that the walls actually fell outward.

Not inward like we would expect, but they fell outward.

When they fell that way, they essentially formed a ramp so the Israelites could just

basically walk right into the city just as the biblical record records.

In the size of the fortified city, once they discovered it, they realized was small enough

and it would have permitted the Israelites to easily march around that city seven times

in one day.

In the Bible, there's a group of people called the Hittites, and they're mentioned nearly

60 times in the Scriptures.

You may remember that Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, was a Hittite.

Up until the start of the 20th century, Bible critics claimed that there is no evidence whatsoever

in any material that they had that the Hittite people actually even existed.

But in 1906, Hugo Winkler discovered a huge storeroom filled with over 10,000 clay tablets

in Turkey.

After completing the difficult task of deciphering the tablets and translating them, he discovered

that there were numerous references to the Hittite people on those tablets.

And every single year, more and more evidence is coming through that's showing the biblical

account is true.

Before I leave this point, I also want to mention that there are more than 30 sources

other than the Bible written within 150 years of Jesus' life that also testified more than

100 facts about his teachings, about his life, about his crucifixion, and of course about

his resurrection.

The fact is that there is so much external evidence that verifies the truth of the Scripture

and the body of proof continues to increase each and every year.

It's getting harder and harder and harder to deny the truth of the Scriptures.

Now let's consider the ancient manuscripts.

As you've heard people claim, that the Bible has been copied so many times and translated

so many times down through the centuries that we just can't trust that what we have today

is actually trustworthy and it accurately reflects the original writings.

First, I need you to hear, it is true that we do not have the original autographs.

Nobody has the original of any of Paul's letters.

What we do have today are what we call manuscripts, handwritten copies of ancient documents that

predate the invention of the printing press.

This is a proof and this is a topic that deserves its own sermon in reality.

There would certainly be more than enough material for at least one message.

So I encourage you to study this some more on your own and I'd be happy to direct you

to some good resources that will help you do that.

But here's the bottom line.

We have more manuscripts of the biblical text that exists than any other ancient writing.

That fact alone should tell us something about how God has preserved his word throughout

several millennia.

The manuscripts that we do have give evidence that there is an amazing degree of consistency

among them that isn't even approached by other texts.

When a shepherd boy was tending his father's sheep, he discovered a cave in Cumran which

is northwest of the Dead Sea in 1947.

He found the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And in those caves, those scrolls gave further evidence in the accuracy of the manuscripts

that we have.

Those 800 scrolls contained fragments from every book of the Old Testament except for

Esther and it included a copy of the entire book of Isaiah that was dated back to 75

B.C.

Scholars were able to compare those scrolls to the Mesoretic text from around 1000 A.D.

which is the primary source of our current day translations.

And when they compared those two, they found that 95% was word for word accurate over a

period of almost 1100 years of hand copying the text.

And that extra 5% variance most were nothing more than just omitted letters or misspelled

words.

And today we have 25,000 partial or complete New Testament manuscripts.

About including 6,000 of those are in Greek, 10,000 of those are in Latin, and another

almost 10,000 are in ancient languages.

But even if we didn't have those, even if we didn't have those, we could still reconstruct

most of the New Testament using just the writings of the early church fathers who quoted the

New Testament Scriptures over 86,000 times.

That's incredible.

If that doesn't help you next, let's consider some prophecy.

If I haven't already given you enough evidence to convince you that the Bible is true, this

should do the trick for sure.

Now many of you will know this, but every year in March, millions of people will fill

out a bracket during March Madness.

What I find interesting about this every single year is that you have these people who study

college basketball, who know college basketball, who know what teams, who know the stats, who

know the players, they know all that.

And they'll form their bracket and think they have a really good chance.

What I find interesting though is those people don't do much better than the people that

choose, and some of you all are guilty of it, some of you all choose which team is going

to win based on which mascot can beat up which mascot, right?

Or these colors match better than those colors, so I'm going to pick that team.

Many of you all are guilty of that, and you do just fine.

There's been an offer on the table for several years now that if anyone will complete a perfect

bracket, you will receive $1 billion.

That's a B.

Nobody's ever done it.

The Bible, on the other hand, has had a much better track record of making predictions.

Considering how much of the Bible consists of prophecy, the fact that not even one of

those prophecies has ever been proven to be false is remarkable.

Now for me personally, the accuracy of biblical prophecy was really driven home for the first

time when I really began to study the book of Daniel, and saw how the prophecies of Daniel,

regarding the future of Israel, and how they were fulfilled literally as the Babylonians,

and the Persians, and the Greeks, and the Roman empires ruled over them, exactly how

Daniel predicted.

And Daniel had even predicted the very day that Jesus would enter into Jerusalem on his

way to die on the cross for us.

That was just one of roughly 300 prophecies in the Old Testament regarding the first

come in of Jesus, and every single one of them was fulfilled by Jesus.

There's a mathematics professor named Peter Stoner, and he decided to have his students

calculate just how incredible that idea is.

So in his book, Science Speaks, Stoner describes how he had all of his math students calculate

the possibility that any person could fulfill just eight of the prophecies that are included

amongst the 300.

So you just got to do eight, and using very conservative assumptions, they calculated

that the odds of one person fulfilling eight of the prophecies from the beginning of time

up until this book was written in 1948 was one in ten to the 17th power.

That's a big number.

To put that in perspective, the odds of winning the power ball are roughly one in 259 million.

If my math is right, that means that the odds of Jesus fulfilling just eight of those prophecies

is something like 50 billion times less likely than winning the power ball.

But Professor Stoner came up with a much better illustration.

If you could take ten to the 17th power, and you took that number in silver dollars and

dumped them on the state of Texas, I don't know if any of you all have been to Texas.

It's big.

You could cover the entire state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep.

And fulfilling the prophecies would be like blindfolding a man, telling him he can travel

as far as he wants to, but he has to go find one marked silver dollar.

The chances of fulfilling eight prophecies is like that blind man looking for one silver

dollar in the state of Texas two feet deep.

But Jesus fulfilled more than eight prophecies.

He fulfilled more than eight prophecies of his first coming in the Old Testament.

He did that and many more and he did that because he is God.

Finally, we can know the Bible is true because of application.

And now I know this book.

I know this book has the power to transform lives.

And up until now, I've presented you with a lot of reasons that I can know the Bible

is true.

But this last reason is both a proof and a challenge.

No other book in the history of the world has had the transforming effect upon the individual

lives and upon the culture as the Bible.

That alone doesn't prove it's true.

But when considered with these other proofs that we've already looked at this morning,

I think it's a compelling argument.

I can certainly testify to this last point personally.

Like many of you, my life has been personally transformed by the Word of God.

For many of my early, for many years of my early life, I wasn't openly hostile towards

God, but I really wasn't interested at all in having anything to do with him in particular.

But when I really began to study his Word for myself, for myself, not because I was in

a Sunday school class, not because it was expected of me, but I really wanted to study

it for myself.

It changed me.

And the Word of God began to really reveal some really important things about my life

that I'd never seen before.

Although I wasn't what most people would consider a bad person, I began to understand that from

God's viewpoint I was a sinner, and that my sin separated me from a holy God.

And then I learned about Jesus and about his sinless life and how he willingly gave up

his life on the cross for me to pay the penalty for my sins.

And as a result of that story, as a result of that truth, I put my faith in Jesus Christ

alone.

And as I've spent time over the years studying and reading and applying the Bible to my life,

it has transformed every single area of my life.

It's transformed my marriage.

It's transformed my parenting.

It's transformed my job.

It's transformed how I interact with people.

And as God does that in the lives of individuals, his Word has the ability to impact entire

communities.

His Word has the ability to impact entire nations.

I mean, that was certainly true when the United States was founded based on biblical principles.

No other book can do that.

No other book can change communities.

That's the proof.

Now, here's the challenge.

My guess is that most of you that are here this morning already believed, already believed

that the Bible is true.

This is not new news to you.

So probably all that I've done is to give you some things to think about that will confirm

your confidence in the Bible.

But if the Bible is indeed true, if you really believe the Bible is true, then the decision

you have to make is whether you're willing to change your life to live out what it says.

You have to decide if you're going to take the time to read it, to study it, to apply

it to your life on a daily basis and allow it to transform you.

You have to make that decision.

If all we do this morning is leave here with a better understanding of why the Bible is

true, but it doesn't make any difference in your life whatsoever.

Then our time together this morning really won't be of much value.

But if having more confidence in the reliability of God's Word causes you to let the Bible

transform you, then this is time well spent.

So as we close this morning, I'm going to ask you, I'm going to ask all of us to spend

a few minutes thinking about the value of the Bible in your life.

And here's how we're going to do that.

I would love for you to take out your Bibles.

If you don't have one, there should be one in front of you.

And I want you to turn to Psalm 119.

And we're very close to the middle.

Once you get to Psalm 119, it's the longest chapter in the Bible, 176 verses.

And what you'll notice when you get to Psalm 119 is it's broken up into different paragraphs.

And each paragraph has a heading that is one of the Hebrew letters.

And so every paragraph is labeled by a different Hebrew letter.

So if you want to learn Hebrew on the side, that's your alphabet.

And I want you to pick out of the 176 verses, I didn't count how many chapters or stanzas

or whatever you want to call it.

But I want you to pick one of those at random.

It doesn't matter which one, just pick one of those at random.

Since the entire Psalm is about the benefits of God's Word, I can assure you that no matter

which stanza of that Psalm you pick, you will be able to do what I'm about to ask you to

do.

Once you've picked out the stanza, once you've picked out your paragraph, whether it's four

verses or six verses or whatever, I want you to spend a few minutes here and just a minute.

I want you to spend a few minutes reading it over several times, read it two times,

three times, four times.

And then I want you to pray and thank God for His Word and the benefits of His Word

that you just read about.

So here in a minute, I'm just going to pray for us.

I'm going to invite the worship team to come back up here.

And we're going to give you a few minutes to kind of read through that.

Read through that several times.

How does that impact your life?

And then I want you to give God thanks for it.

Let's pray.

Father God, I pray right now that as we hold your words in our hand, as we look at a Psalm

that declares the benefits that you've given us because of it, I pray, Father, that you'll

speak to our hearts.

I pray that the words will come alive to us.

I pray that the words that are read and prayed over will have a far greater impact than anything

that I've said.

Father, I pray that your spirit will fill this room.

Help us understand it.

Help us see the value in it.

Help us see the purpose of it.

Help us know without a doubt that your word is truth.

And it can benefit every single area of our life.

So I pray, Father, that as we read that your Holy Spirit will empower us to understand it.

We give this time to you.

That's your name you pray.